The Genome Report is 68 pages of great reading. Lots of details go into the general conclusions that you see in the info graphic. It is included at the bottom of this post as well. Interestingly, they go even farther than just producing a report. There’s an a survey you can fill out, the startup compass, which will help determine how your startup compares to other startups they did their research on for the Genome project. I went partway through this survey myself, but at some point it becomes apparent that it is not really a good match for services businesses, it is really about product businesses. And that’s fine – it is still far and away the most interesting pattern-matching tool I’ve seen for startups.

And the key finding seems to be exactly what Austin Startup focused on:

One of the big findings amongst the data was that almost 7 out of 10 companies failed due to premature scaling or inconsistency. Peeling back the data, the lessons seem really simple: don’t act like a big company.

Fascinating stuff… or scary stuff, if you’re running against the statistics they’ve collected… The statistics definitely back the idea of the lean startup.

(Side note for BPM practitioners… how can we apply this kind of data and thinking to our own BPM efforts as we grow them from projects to programs and beyond?)